At least in the United States, pretty much all geographic information - at the local, state and federal levels - is now being remeasured and stored in GIS formats. I can say first-hand that governments and government contractors are constantly needing programmers that can talk to ArcGIS and properly visualize that information. This is true for any agency that needs to deal with official definitions of geography when calculating their statistics - I've seen law enforcement agencies, transportation agencies and housing agencies all need GIS applications developed, to name a few. And probably some sexier TLA agencies in Washington, although my experience with GIS for transportation didn't give me much exposure for those fields.

The nice thing about this sort of career is that you can do it in a wide variety of cities and states. Your girlfriend is moving to Florida? You can work for the state transportation department in Tallahassee. Oh, she's in Miami you say? Miami's almost certainly a big enough city to be creating its own municipal GIS data and needing programmers to work with it.

Definitely. Down here in Australia, even before the mining industry boom, there was always a shortage of GIS developers.

I did ArcGIS development for a few years, and some other ESRI development before ArcGIS was a twinkle in MapObjects and ArcIMS's eye. I've never seen anyone skilled in those technologies wanting for work.

Plenty of contracts to, which can be quite lucrative once you've got some experience under your belt.

I could go on...

I'm from Europe (Belgium) so I can't really comment on the situation in the USA. But we have here a continuous need for good GIS programmers for government contract work but also for utility organisations and some larger businesses. Also things like track-and-trace are booming. I never regretted getting in this business although I must admit that I came from the opposite direction (from a master in geography to fulltime programming).

Yeah, GIS skills are useful in many different fields. I work for a lines company, and they use GIS extensively to manage their electrical distribution network.

Yes.